https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/cross-check/survey-of-earliest-human-settlements-undermines-claim-that-war-has-deep-evolutionary-roots/

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Survey of Earliest Human Settlements Undermines Claim that War Has Deep Evolutionary Roots

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The survey is by Rutgers anthropologist Brian Ferguson, an authority on the origins of warfare. In a 2003 Natural History article, "The Birth of War," Ferguson presented preliminary results of his examination of early human settlements. He argued that "the global archaeological record contradicts the idea that war was always a feature of human existence; instead, the record shows that warfare is largely a development of the last 10,000 years."

That conclusion has been corroborated by Ferguson's new, in-depth survey, which he discusses in "The Prehistory of War and Peace in Europe and the Near East," a chapter in War, Peace, and Human Nature, a 2013 collection edited by Douglas Fry and published by Oxford University Press. (See also a chapter in which Ferguson critiques an interpretation of archaeological data by Deep Rooter Steven Pinker.)

Ferguson closely examines excavations of early human settlements in Europe and the Near East in the Neolithic era, when our ancestors started abandoning their nomadic ways and domesticating plants and animals. Ferguson shows that evidence of war in this era is quite variable.

In many regions of Europe, Neolithic settlements existed for 500-1,000 years without leaving signs of warfare. "As time goes on, more war signs are fixed in all potential lines of evidence—skeletons, settlements, weapons and sometimes art," Ferguson writes. "But there is no simple line of increase."

By the time Europeans started supplementing stone tools with metal ones roughly 5,500 years ago, "a culture of war was in place across all of Europe," Ferguson writes. "After that," Ferguson told me by email, "you see the growth of cultural militarism, culminating in the warrior societies of the Bronze Age."

Ferguson finds even more variability in the Near East. He notes that "the Western world's first widespread, enduring social system of war" emerged almost 8,000 years ago in Anatolia, which overlaps modern-day Turkey and includes the legendary city of Troy. "This is the start of a system of war that flows down in a river of blood to the present," Ferguson asserts.

But excavations in the Southern Levant--a region that includes modern Jordan, Syria, Israel and Palestine--tell a dramatically different story. Ferguson notes that hunter gatherers started settling in the Southern Levant 15,000 years ago, and populations surged after the emergence of agriculture there 11,000 years ago. But there is no significant evidence of warfare in the Southern Levant until about 5,500 years ago, when the region increasingly came under the influence of the emerging military empire of Egypt, according to Ferguson.

In other words, humans lived and thrived in the Southern Levant for roughly 10,000 years--a period that included population growth, climate shifts and environmental degradation, all of which are thought to be triggers of warfare—without waging war.